A
nyone who has experienced Brae, this year’s
winner of GT’s Regional Restaurant of the Year,
won’t be surprised that the recipes created by
chef and owner Dan Hunter for this issue require
at least a medium level of kitchen skill. Hunter
is an uncompromising chef and his food is
not only delicious, it’s also complex and often highly technical.
But these recipes are all about Brae on a day off and so
represent a more relaxed version of the dishes that land on
the tables of Hunter’s country Victorian restaurant.
“I’ve done versions of some dishes from the menu at Brae
with the same flavour profiles but in a simpler form than how
we present them in the restaurant,” says Hunter. “There’s a
level of skill required – things like the croissant dough require
a bit of concentration – but I’ve made them so people will be
able to successfully cook these recipes at home, which is what
these dishes are all about.”
The food here work as a menu for a long weekend lunch with
friends, starting with snacks, then moving through to shared
dishes. But each dish can stand alone in its own right, too.
“The dishes like the kohlrabi taco and the raw scallops
served on a croissant are good as cocktail food,” Hunter says.
“They’re easy to eat and fresh and lively with raw seafood and
ingredients like finger lime.”
The food does require some forward planning. The
fermented vegetable salad, for example, needs to be prepared
at least three weeks before you plan to serve it. But it’s worth
getting it organised, not just because it tastes so good but
also, Hunter believes, because fermented flavours are
becoming increasingly essential to the Australian palate.
“Twenty years ago, if you put fermented flavours on a menu
in a Western kitchen, people would tell you that the food was
off,” he says. “Now, as people have a broader understanding
of the flavour profile and a wider palate, they’ve come to
expect to them on the menu. Once you get a taste for them,
you start to crave them.”
Hunter has designed these recipes to be interesting and
fun. To that end he suggests enhancing the rhubarb and
strawberry-gum spider, the drink-dessert hybrid, with a slug
of vodka to finish the meal.
“That’ll make sure that the party doesn’t finish once lunch
is over,” he says.
Brae, 4285 Cape Otway Rd, Birregurra, Vic, (03) 5236 2226,
braerestaurant.comRight, from top:
Brae co-owner and
operations manager
(and Hunter’s wife)
Jules Bagnato;
Hunter works
the garden.124 GOURMET TRAVELLER